Where the RIAA, the campuses and/or i2hub went wrong
Having just sent my obligatory "have I been subpoenaed" email to the Dean of the Students Office, I believe we should all take a moment and reflect on this RIAA nonsense. Of course, you can spew the "copyright infringment" business, which is 100% accurate, but so long as music companies continue their current marketing strategies of exorbitant costs it's foolish to expect file sharing to cease evolving and improving.
Let us consider the story of photography companies, such as Eastman Kodak. For many years, if someone wanted additional copies or enlargements of photographs, they went to a professional, to whom Kodak sold the papers and the chemicals required for completing this process. As technology improved, it became possible for people to not only edit and copy pictures on their own, but also to take them. Did Kodak executives drag every photo scanner and digital camera producer into court, telling a sad story about their declining sales? No - they embraced the new technologies. They began selling digital cameras instead of film, and thousands of Kodak kiosks now let people edit and copy pictures themselves. Adaptation proved to be much more profitable than litigation.
Look at iTunes: Apple sold over a million songs in the first week the music retail system was operating. They addressed music downloaders as a market, not a threat, and have been making handsome profits as a result.
Now, we consider the the RIAA, which claims to represent businesses, and how it has failed to follow suit and adapt; instead of working to implement technologies to deter filesharing (or lowering their prices to make it less appealing to starving college students), the RIAA is acting like an indignant candlestickmaker, cursing at the powerlines that are eroding his sales. Of course, while the candle guy has little ability to make his product less expensive or brighter burning, the RIAA has run to its lawyers rather than it's R&D people (does the RIAA have R&D people?).
Of course, as fun as it is to gripe about the RIAA, there are other people more deserving of our gratitude and/or rage.
The i2 sysytem was revolutionary in that it was "secure"; whereas phynd could be scanned by users at remote locations, i2hub offered a layer of security, in that users supposedly had to connect to an i2-subscribed campus in order to download.
Besides on the actions of the students themselves, responsibility for these subpoenas lies squarely with one of two groups: either a campus network had lax enough security policies that some permitted some goon from the RIAA to walk in, plug into their network and snoop around i2hub, or the RIAA got wind of the nifty policy of the i2hub operators allowing people to connect from offcampus for a measly $5 fee.
If the latter was true, then the stupidity of the people who created the greatest filesharing systems many of us have ever used resulted in 405 users getting nailed, at a cost to the RIAA of less than the price of one of their CDs.
Let us consider the story of photography companies, such as Eastman Kodak. For many years, if someone wanted additional copies or enlargements of photographs, they went to a professional, to whom Kodak sold the papers and the chemicals required for completing this process. As technology improved, it became possible for people to not only edit and copy pictures on their own, but also to take them. Did Kodak executives drag every photo scanner and digital camera producer into court, telling a sad story about their declining sales? No - they embraced the new technologies. They began selling digital cameras instead of film, and thousands of Kodak kiosks now let people edit and copy pictures themselves. Adaptation proved to be much more profitable than litigation.
Look at iTunes: Apple sold over a million songs in the first week the music retail system was operating. They addressed music downloaders as a market, not a threat, and have been making handsome profits as a result.
Now, we consider the the RIAA, which claims to represent businesses, and how it has failed to follow suit and adapt; instead of working to implement technologies to deter filesharing (or lowering their prices to make it less appealing to starving college students), the RIAA is acting like an indignant candlestickmaker, cursing at the powerlines that are eroding his sales. Of course, while the candle guy has little ability to make his product less expensive or brighter burning, the RIAA has run to its lawyers rather than it's R&D people (does the RIAA have R&D people?).
Of course, as fun as it is to gripe about the RIAA, there are other people more deserving of our gratitude and/or rage.
The i2 sysytem was revolutionary in that it was "secure"; whereas phynd could be scanned by users at remote locations, i2hub offered a layer of security, in that users supposedly had to connect to an i2-subscribed campus in order to download.
Besides on the actions of the students themselves, responsibility for these subpoenas lies squarely with one of two groups: either a campus network had lax enough security policies that some permitted some goon from the RIAA to walk in, plug into their network and snoop around i2hub, or the RIAA got wind of the nifty policy of the i2hub operators allowing people to connect from offcampus for a measly $5 fee.
If the latter was true, then the stupidity of the people who created the greatest filesharing systems many of us have ever used resulted in 405 users getting nailed, at a cost to the RIAA of less than the price of one of their CDs.
posted by Bernstein at 10:34 AM
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